Highlighting Scientific PDF texts in Preview

[capoeirista]

Hey everyone, quick question.

I have been reading a huge amount of PDF journal articles for my PhD. Often I am reading these onscreen in Preview. If I am searching for a specific word then when these words are found, they are higlighted in grey. The question is this: is it possible to change the highlighter colour? Often the text is very small if I am searching a page at a time, the grey against white is nigh on impossible to spot leading me to have to scan the whole page which make searching a bit of a waste of time. My eyes hurt. I've tried fiddling with the prefs, but haven't yet found the correct option.

Cheers...

 

[davidjearly]

Hey everyone, quick question.

I have been reading a huge amount of PDF journal articles for my PhD. Often I am reading these onscreen in Preview. If I am searching for a specific word then when these words are found, they are higlighted in grey. The question is this: is it possible to change the highlighter colour? Often the text is very small if I am searching a page at a time, the grey against white is nigh on impossible to spot leading me to have to scan the whole page which make searching a bit of a waste of time. My eyes hurt. I've tried fiddling with the prefs, but haven't yet found the correct option.

Cheers...

I don't think so i'm afraid. However, you might find this app useful just for finding and reading articles. I use it everyday now. It has full pubmed integration.

See here: http://mekentosj.com/papers/

HTH, David

 

[mkrishnan]

The highlight color in Preview is defined by the universal system text highlight color. You change it here:

System Preferences -> Appearance -> Highlight Color.

You can make it any color you wish from there. The change should affect most programs (Cocoa-based ones at least). All the system apps like Preview will be affected. I think most other well-behaved apps should also -- MS Office does, for instance, although it is not Cocoa based as far as I know.

 

[irbdavid]

Go to System Preferences / Appearance and change the highlight colour there. This will change it globally however, and only gives you a few discrete colours to pick from.

I'm not sure what kinds of options the Adobe PDF viewer gives you in this regard however - maybe more, maybe less.

On a side note, it is possible your display colours aren't calibrated correctly. The photoshop-happy people on this site might not like me telling you this, but you can up the display gamma to the PC standard, which I find improves situations like the one you're describing.

Failing that, get your supervisor to buy you a >20" Dell/ACD monitor. Might not help, but will look cool

 

[mkrishnan]

This will change it globally however, and only gives you a few discrete colours to pick from.

The option marked "other" is not a specific color -- it allows you to select any color your screen is capable of, using the standard Apple color selection interfaces....

 

[capoeirista]

Thanks everyone!

Nice one guys! It does get ever so slightly more complicated, see if you can recreate it. Search using Spotlight for a word in a PDF file. Open that file from Spotlight. This word should be highlighted (now in Gold thanks to the Prefs edit ) the first time it appears, if you then search for the next time it appears (apple+G I think although I use the 'drawer' in preview) the gold becomes the grey again... Grrr. Any thoughts?


BTW I came across Pages (mentioned earlier) quite by acccident myself today, it looks like iTunes for journals. Hmmmm....interesting.

 

[mkrishnan]

Nice one guys! It does get ever so slightly more complicated, see if you can recreate it. Search using Spotlight for a word in a PDF file. Open that file from Spotlight. This word should be highlighted (now in Gold thanks to the Prefs edit ) the first time it appears, if you then search for the next time it appears (apple+G I think although I use the 'drawer' in preview) the gold becomes the grey again... Grrr. Any thoughts?

Hmmm, you're right. Strange.

 

[Bensheim]

Nice one guys! It does get ever so slightly more complicated, see if you can recreate it. Search using Spotlight for a word in a PDF file. Open that file from Spotlight. This word should be highlighted (now in Gold thanks to the Prefs edit ) the first time it appears, if you then search for the next time it appears (apple+G I think although I use the 'drawer' in preview) the gold becomes the grey again... Grrr. Any thoughts?


BTW I came across Pages (mentioned earlier) quite by acccident myself today, it looks like iTunes for journals. Hmmmm....interesting.

I have this exact same query myself and have put it up on MacFixit. To my astonishment it's already showing up in Google.

Further Google searches yielded this article which was immensely helpful and has solved the problem. I 100% agree with the Author about the OS X drawers, too.

link here